‘We’ve been looking at the impact of our urchin biostimulant on lettuce for 67 days now,’ says Abirami Ramu Ganesan, a research scientist with NIBIO, talking mid-April. Her work has a dual focus: on food production and society as well as biomarine resource valorisation – disciplines that come together on the Ocean Green project.

‘What we’ve found is a significant increase in biomass production compared to the control – and compared to a seaweed-based extract as well,’ she says.

The results point to the urchin biostimulant as a highly effective growth enhancer. At the right concentration, the urchin biostimulant performed as well as, and in some cases even better than, the commercial product, though the commercial one was more consistent overall. Such a marked improvement in yield suggests strong potential for scalable, sustainable agricultural applications.

This difference is clear to see from photos of the lettuce Ganesan has been growing in her lab in Bodø, more than 1,000 km north of Oslo – and some 70 km north of the Arctic Circle – where she explains that the team chose lettuce largely because it was likely to grow well in the limited space of the lab.

There are no farmer’s markets

There is another factor too. Ralf Rautenberger, another research scientist at NIBIO, explains that, up in the north of Norway in particular – where people spend multiple months of the year shrouded in night – the choice, supply and quality of fresh vegetables leaves room for improvement.

‘Here in the north we don’t have any farmer’s markets, for example,’ says Rautenberger, ‘and there isn’t always a huge variety available, so green-leaf lettuce is a great choice for us to work on’.

At the moment, iceberg is one of the more commonly found lettuce options – but it is also one of the least nutritious lettuce varieties. On top of that, there is evidence of a global reduction in the nutrition we get from fruit and vegetables, something that goes hand in hand with the need to find new fertiliser and biostimulant sources. .

‘The range of what we eat needs to be expanded – if only for nutritional reasons. So, if you could introduce a new vegetable for Norwegians to eat, then green lettuce is a good choice,’ says Rautenberger.

It is also a theme tied to much wider issues. There are the sustainability questions around the global fertiliser supply chain as well as the impact of geopolitics here. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for example, sent global fertiliser and food markets into turmoil, with fertiliser prices remaining high. Diversification is needed, home-grown solutions, derived from a source that needs managing – such as northern Norway’s urchin barrens – presents a great opportunity to tick multiple boxes with a single, spiky pest.

Implications for the urchin harvest

The research to develop biostimulants from the urchins harvested as part of the Ocean Green are still in the early stages with a lot to be uncovered. Ganesan explains, for example, that she is also looking at the shelf life of the biostimulant, which must be reliably stabilised in order to begin thinking about any scale up.

All this has implications that go to the very core of the Ocean Green project. ‘The most important thing is to stabilise the chemical components of the urchin,’ says Ganesan. And that influences the way that these creatures can be harvested as well as how they’re stored on the vessel or how long they can spend between ocean and lab.

This is what the Ocean Green project is all about: bringing funding opportunities that secure longevity for a project developing a new, circular economy with urchins at its core.

For Dagny-Elise Anastassiou, chief impact officer at Ava Ocean and management lead for the Ocean Green project, this latest development comes back to the ‘poetry of the Ocean Green story’.

A zero-waste approach

‘We have Ava Ocean – a fishing company – trying to play its part in correcting something that our industry helped to break in the first place. But it was not just overfishing that damaged our coastal marine ecosystems. Another culprit is runoffs from the agricultural sector, with fertilisers leading to overgrowth of algae that can have potentially disastrous consequences for local biodiversity.

‘By using the urchins from the fishery to offer substitutes for these products, we add value both financially and ecologically.’

Then, there is the circular economy focus of the project.

‘When you remove urchins for kelp restoration, you address the cause but are left with a huge volume of urchins biomass,’ explains Anastassiou. ‘Instead of wasting these urchins, we are turning them into a valuable resource. Being able to produce fertiliser alternatives is one way of applying a zero-waste approach to one of the causes of kelp deforestation. Ideally, if we want the trifecta, the harvested area would be banned from fishing to allow the larger fish to establish themselves. but that’s a whole other Pandora's box in Norway.